by Wade Davis
ARTHUR WAKEFIELD HAD BEEN STATIONED behind the lines at the Somme since the last days of 1915. In the weeks before the battle he was attached to the 29th Casualty Clearing Station, encamped at Gézaincourt, a village southwest of Doullens and less than a day’s walk from Somervell at Vecquemont. The stark simplicity of his diary entries suggests the values of a generation of men not yet prepared to yield their emotions to analysis or reflection. He describes his daily routine: a cross-country run in the early morning, followed by a hot bath and “breaker,” as he called breakfast. He visits the wards, attends sick parade, processes the wounded, and oversees as he can the religious rites that attempt to give meaning to the incessant burial parties that dampen each afternoon. In the evening he reads and writes, or “yarns” with his fellow officers in the mess. And, like Somervell, he slips away whenever possible to seek color and life behind the desolation and bleakness of the front. He plants a garden, sets snares for rabbits, enjoys the wildflowers of a Picardy spring, while all the time hovering over everything are the sounds of distant and not so distant bombardments. Each day he writes a single page in the diary, and each entry concludes with a description of the weather.
Of his work and the wounded he speaks little, and it is only the official war diary of the 29th CCS that reveals the extent of the casualties brought in every morning and night, fifty to a hundred a day, and this at a time—the early spring of 1916—of relative calm on the front. This constant attrition, what the high commanders in their distant châteaus termed wastage, can only be understood in the context of a war that went on for four years and four months and saw among the British forces alone, on average, some 600 deaths a day, with 1,700 additional daily casualties.
On April 4 Wakefield recorded the arrival of the 29th Division, which, to his surprise and delight, included the ranks of the Newfoundland Regiment. He had had no direct contact with his boys of Labrador since the previous summer, when he’d remained in France as the regiment, swollen to battalion strength, embarked for Egypt and the Gallipoli campaign. He knew from the scuttlebutt that they had landed at Suvla Bay and for six months, afflicted with cholera, dysentery, typhus, and trench foot, had faced a bloody trial until finally being evacuated from the Dardanelles in the first days of 1916. Now, having landed at Marseille on March 22, they were back with him. By remarkable coincidence, Wakefield’s casualty clearing station was positioned in the very sector of the front where his boys would fight. With considerable pride, Wakefield stood by the roadside in Gézaincourt and searched for familiar faces. It was an ominous sight: 12,000 men, 6,000 horses, along with heavy and light artillery, supply wagons, ambulances, and field kitchens, spread along fifteen miles of road. On a day of constant drizzle and cold rain, it took the division five hours merely to pass through the town. “There is an air of expectancy and rumours of our going are rife,” Wakefield noted in his diary that night. “Leave has been stopped and those on leave have been recalled.”
On Tuesday, May 16, Wakefield slipped away from his work and bicycled through Beauquesne and Marieux to visit the regiment at Louvencourt. It was a splendid day, he later wrote: lunch with the senior staff, followed by a tour of the company headquarters, where he caught up with the junior officers and “yarned with the enlisted men.” After tea at battalion headquarters, he left at 6:00 p.m. and pedaled home in an hour, a “perfectly glorious ride” on a cloudless day with a soft wind blowing from the south. He had no idea that he would never see any of the men again. A month later the roads everywhere were clogged with guns and ammunition. On June 21, Wakefield wrote: “All preparations are ready for dealing with patients expected from the great advance. There is a universal atmosphere of growing expectations in the air. Wind SW, moderate, fine and sunny. Warmer.”
THE ATTACK ON THE SOMME had been six months in the planning. After all the debacles of 1915, the failed effort to break through at Neuve Chapelle in March, the disappointment of the Dardanelles, the suicidal resistance of the Canadians at Ypres in April, the collapse at Aubers Ridge and the disaster at Loos, the September battle known to the Germans as Der Leichenfeld von Loos (the Corpse Field of Loos), every British hope lay upon one great massive offensive that would finally break the German line and open the coastal plain to a war of movement, thus relieving the French and freeing commander and soldier alike from the degradation and agony of the trenches. This was the promise that ran like a wave through the men of the Fourth Army, half a million strong, poised for the assault.
With the outcome of the war—indeed, the fate of the empire—seemingly in the balance, nothing could be left to chance. The battle orders for the Marne in 1914, the massive confrontation that had saved France, had been outlined in six paragraphs. For the Somme, the British General Staff, some three hundred officers working under Haig’s command at his luxurious château far behind the lines at Montreuil, devised a document of fifty-seven pages that outlined precise timetables with exactitude, considering every detail, prescribing every action, anticipating every outcome. It was a masterful plan on paper, certain to succeed. The British armies had since 1914 increased from four to fifty-eight divisions. At the Somme they would outnumber the Germans seven to one. For the preliminary bombardment, Haig planned on having nearly three million shells available. More guns would be fired in a week than had been discharged by the British thus far in the entire war. In the first seven days alone some twenty thousand tons of steel would blast the German lines. Then the men would attack, 13 divisions in the initial assault, 66,000 men in the first wave, rising out of the trenches along a fourteen-mile front. Victory would be assured, though, as a staff document cautioned, “All must be prepared for heavy casualties.” As more than one historian has suggested, the British in the end guaranteed such casualties by their tactics.
The generals did not trust their men as soldiers, or their ability to control the field once the battle broke. The war, though industrial in scale and firepower, remained primitive in terms of communications. Radio was only beginning, and phone lines and cables rarely survived bombardments. Once the artillery barrage had lifted and the men went over the top, they were essentially on their own, with communication with the British line limited to signals and flares, and messages hastily scrawled in lead pencil and carried back by runners or courier pigeons. A plan to identify units from the air by sewing diamond-shaped pieces of reflective tin on the backs of the men collapsed in the chaos of the battle and succeeded only in making individual soldiers more effective targets. An order from headquarters to a frontline battalion could take as long as six hours. Frequently such messages, disconnected from the immediate reality of the scene, did more harm than good, and when possible were best ignored—unless, of course, they mercifully ordered a withdrawal.
For Haig and the General Staff, the biggest uncertainty was the quality of the troops under their command. The regular army, the men with whom these generals had known glory in South Africa and the Sudan, on the North-West Frontier and at a hundred other distant imperial postings from Gibraltar to Barbados, lay dead in the mud of Flanders. Territorial units, derived from various local militias, volunteers, and yeomanry, had by late 1914 been hastily forged into 14 infantry divisions, along with 14 cavalry brigades. Initially dispatched oversees to free garrison troops for service in France, they would almost all end up doing time in the trenches. Death was such a constant that the physical criteria for joining the army shifted by the month. At the outbreak a man had to stand five foot eight to join up; by November 1914, those as short as five-three were eagerly recruited.
Lord Kitchener, British minister for war, alone among British leaders had from the start of the conflict predicted a long, impossibly brutal industrial war that would consume the wealth of nations. He placed little faith in the Territorial units, dismissing them as a “town clerk’s army.” His mission was to forge from the two million volunteers who flocked to the colors during the first eighteen months of the war a “New Army” in his own image, prepared to win victory and enf
orce the peace. By 1916 Kitchener himself was dead, drowned at sea while on a mission to Russia, but his army was ready, the largest, best-equipped, and most thoroughly trained force in the history of the country. His recruits of 1914, boys and men from every hamlet and valley and street corner, drawn from every guild and club and voluntary civic association, had become the foundation of British arms. Of the 143 battalions scheduled for the attack at the Somme, fully 97 were New Army. Many had signed up together, drawn by Kitchener’s promise that those who enlisted together would fight together. They shared an almost mystical patriotism, and a sense of duty and honor difficult to imagine today. They were indeed, as was often said, the flower of British youth and manhood.
But Commander in Chief Douglas Haig had his doubts. None of these Kitchener soldiers had been tested in combat, and he was about to send them against a German army at the height of its power. The officers of the New Army were young and inexperienced, or drawn from the ranks of the old, “keen amateurs,” as Haig put it, retired commanders of the Indian Army, pensioners, and militia colonels. In 1916, virtually any British gentleman could secure a commission, but this was no guarantee that he would know how to fight. Veterans of the prewar army and units of that army were dispersed among the attacking force, but no battalion destined for the Somme had more than a quarter of its complement drawn from survivors of the regular army. Of the eleven divisions of the Fourth Army listed for battle, six had never seen combat.
Haig’s solution was to treat the entire battle as if it were a complex training exercise, a military parade under live fire. The Fourth Army’s orders made this injunction explicit: “The men must learn to obey by instinct without thinking. The whole advance must be carried out as a drill.” There would be no attempt at surprise. Following a preliminary bombardment, unprecedented in scale and destructive power, the army would advance in ranks in regular waves. Two battalions of a thousand men each would leave the trench by scaling ladders, extend their soldiers in four lines, a company to each, with each man separated from the next by two yards, and with each line of advance separated from the next by twenty yards. Each soldier would carry, in addition to rifle and bayonet, sixty-six pounds of gear; wire cutters, 220 rounds of ammunition, mess kits, empty sandbags, flares, an entrenching shovel, battle dressings, two gas masks, and two grenades. Given these loads, the ranks of the attackers would be formed slowly and deliberately, with order maintained by officers equipped only with swagger sticks to overcome the noise: polished blackthorn for the Irish regiments, malacca cane and ash wood for the rest. These were as useful in combat as a conductor’s baton. It was an officer’s duty to lead, not to kill, and save for a service revolver, none carried arms into battle. To guarantee discipline and order, Haig insisted that the advance on the German line be done at a deliberate walking pace. The distance between the lines varied up and down the front and in places was as much as 1.5 miles. To the British high command this was of no concern, for the artillery bombardment would assure that the enemy wire would be cut and that no German would be left alive to resist the advance.
On Sunday, June 25, Wakefield’s diary has a single brief entry. “The big Strafe began last night. We couldn’t hear much, but late at night we could see the flashes of the guns in the sky almost continuously. Wind W, light. Fine except for a few light showers. Hot.”
For the following seven days, the sky by night and day rained steel upon the Germans. In London the air throbbed above Hampstead Heath, and the sound of the war was felt throughout the south of England. At the front the British troops stumbled as the ground shook through their boots. A Canadian private wrote, “One’s whole body seemed to be in a mad macabre dance … I felt that if I lifted a finger I should touch a solid ceiling of sound, it now had the attribute of solidity.”
The bombardment grew to a sustained crescendo, a hurricane of piercing screams that hovered over the entire length of the front. Nothing like this had been seen in the history of war. Napoleon at Waterloo had fired 20,000 shells; the British at the Somme had in place 1,537 batteries, each capable of firing 1,000 rounds a day. An NCO of the 22nd Manchester Rifles described the bombardment: “The sound was different, not only in magnitude but in quality, from anything known to me … It hung over us. It seemed as though the air were full of vast and agonized passion, bursting now with groans and sighs, now into shrill screaming and pitiful whimpering, shuddering beneath terrible blows, torn by unearthly whips, vibrating with the solemn pulses of enormous wings. And the supernatural tumult did not pass in this direction or in that. It did not begin, intensify, decline and end. It was poised in the air, a stationary panorama of sound, a condition of the atmosphere, not the creation of man.”
The frontline troops pitied their enemy, for they knew what it was to lie defenseless before such an assault: the horrible nightmare of bursting shells, the noise that shatters the nerves, the waiting for the ugliest of deaths, obliteration in a whistle. To lie helpless in a trench in the midst of a bombardment was, as one soldier recalled, like being tied to a post and attacked by an enemy wielding a sledgehammer. The hammer swings back for the blow, whirls forward, till, “just missing your skull, it sends the splinters flying from the post once more. This is exactly what it feels like to be exposed to heavy shelling.” The blood rises to the head, fever burns the body, nerves, stretched to their limit, break. Men lose control, whimper and moan, and their eyes sink deep into sockets that will never again know the light.
The thunder of the shells filled the British with a hope that would be cruelly betrayed. Haig had chosen the Somme for the attack in part because it allowed his troops to escape the sodden fields and muddy slime of Flanders and promised the possibility of breakthrough. But the very conditions of Picardy that had drawn his attention also allowed the Germans to dig, and they did, establishing dugouts and shelters in the chalk forty and sixty feet below the torn surface of the earth, impervious even to the shells of the relatively few heavy howitzers the British brought to bear. And here was another problem: the vast majority of the British guns fired shrapnel, which made an impressive sight as it tossed skyward the German wire and burst with sprays of soil. But it did not cut the wire, and most certainly did not penetrate the ground. What’s more, a third of the projectiles were duds. Unbeknownst to the British, the German troops, stunned and afraid, often bleeding from the ears and nose due to the concussive pressure of the shells, quaking in fear of death but quite unprepared to die, waited deep beneath the ground, anticipating the onslaught.
Their commanders had had two years to prepare their defense. Haig was not a man of impulse or instinct, but he did have the unfailing ability to select for attack the strongest conceivable point in his enemy’s defenses. The Germans had established three successive lines of defense that followed the high ground. They had transformed the gently undulating farmland into thickets of wire, interlocking zones of fire with a depth of more than four thousand yards, well beyond the range of the heaviest of British artillery. For the British to advance they would have to penetrate not simply the front line and reserve trenches but fully twelve lines of defense before open country might be embraced. On an eighteen-mile front the Germans had fortified as unassailable redoubts nine villages, the names of which would echo in history: Montauban, Mametz, Fricourt, La Boisselle, Ovillers, Thiepval, Beaumont-Hamel, Serre, and Gommecourt. The German line wound across and over every point of high ground and each promontory was fortified. More than a thousand machine guns were in place. Attacking troops confronted an impossible choice of assaulting the strong points directly in the face of fire or attempting a flanking movement exposed to fire from all sides.
Unlike the British, the Germans fully understood the power of the machine gun. Even the finest soldier with a rifle must pick his own targets, struggle with distractions, and ignore the cries of the wounded to get off perhaps fifteen rounds a minute, if highly trained. The machine gun was, by contrast, the concentrated essence of war. The operators did not aim, or even fire t
he weapon. They simply fed the belts of ammunition into the breech, monitored the level of coolant, and with precise two-inch taps traversed the barrel across the field of fire, unleashing a stream of bullets so dense that a mile out no one could walk upright without being shot. The weapon mechanized death; properly calibrated, it could be ready to sweep a parapet with a maelstrom within moments of being anchored in place. And this is precisely what the Germans accomplished.
On the night of June 30, 1916, the eve of the attack, Arthur Wakefield wrote, “The sky was alight with gun flashes, but we could scarcely hear any reports. One of my patients tells me we have been using large quantities of an exceedingly poisonous gas. One single breath of it had gassed him. He says a raiding party that had gone over reported the German trenches full of dead. Wind SW, light, showering a.m., dull p.m. then clearing to a beautiful night.” The previous day Wakefield had picked up other news from a pair of old friends, Green and Strong, both young officers of the Newfoundland Regiment, who had been badly wounded in their own raid on the German lines. Green had personally killed six of the enemy. Wakefield noted, “Yarned with them a bit and then walked back to the station and stayed with them till they were put on the train. Then I did my ward rounds. After lunch I saw new cases and did a little gardening. Wind NW mod—strong, cloudy but fine all day.” The new cases in fact numbered 135, twice a typical dispatch. This gave Wakefield pause, for he knew what was coming. What he did not know at the time, of course, was that these fortunate young Newfoundland subalterns, Green and Strong, would be, aside from the commanding officer and his adjutant, the only officers of the Newfoundland Regiment to survive the first day of the Somme.